Undergraduate Research Assistance: Data on Human Rights Violations.

这项研究解决了当今世界政治中具有明显重要性的四个首要问题。当国家酷刑发生时，政府的哪个机构实施酷刑？国家对酷刑指控的反应是什么？ 谁被折磨？使用了哪些类型的酷刑？该项目解决了所有四个问题，但特别侧重于前两个问题。 这项研究旨在查明政治体制对酷刑做法的影响，特别是对消除酷刑做法的影响。 要绘制这样一幅地图，研究人员就必须确定所涉的具体政府机构，并开始探讨政治机构和具体政策对消除酷刑的影响。 该项目利用大赦国际的报告收集关于军队、警察、监狱官员和其他政府机构虐待或酷刑被拘留者的程度的数据。 这个项目是从调查员那里发展出来的？他先前的研究发现，只有当没有团体使用暴力挑战政府时，民主国家才比专制政府更有可能消除酷刑。该研究还发现，体制上的分权使政府不太可能消除酷刑做法。 虽然这项工作确定了政治体制与酷刑做法之间的重要联系，但由于关于政府未能履行其不实施酷刑义务的程度的现有数据很粗糙，这项工作是有限的。 在调查员先前由国家科学基金会资助的工作中，20多名本科生和几名研究生阅读了大赦国际1995-2005年的出版物，并对政府实施酷刑、调查酷刑指控和惩罚那些被判犯有酷刑罪的人的程度等各种变量的数据进行了编码。 这一新项目将收集到的原始数据转换成便于用户使用的数据，可在互联网上查阅。 原始数据被汇编成两种格式，其中一种在关于冲突、合作和人权的学术文献中被广泛使用，另一种作为一种有价值的替代标准，正越来越多地被接受。 本科研究助理将被雇用来执行这些任务的大部分。 佛罗里达州立大学有一个本科研究计划，该计划确定，招聘和培训学生参加教师研究，为追求荣誉论文做准备，并为他们提供背景，以有效地申请研究生课程或追求研究发挥作用的其他机会。 因此，该项目将通过为下一代研究人员提供本科生的经验，为国家科学基础设施的发展做出贡献。这一对公众开放、方便用户的数据库将成为研究人员和人权倡导者感兴趣的其他各种分析的信息来源。

This research addresses four overarching questions of clear importance in world politics today. When state torture occurs, what agency of the government tortures? What is the state response to allegations of torture? Who is tortured? What types of torture are used? The project tackles all four questions, but is focused particularly on the first two. The research seeks to map the impact of political institutions on the practice of torture and especially upon the elimination of torture as a practice. Building such a map requires that the researchers identify the specific government agencies involved and begin to explore the impact of both political institutions and specific policies upon the elimination of torture. The project uses Amnesty International (AI) reports to collect data on the extent to which the military, police officers, prison officials, and other government agencies ill-treat or torture those in their custody. The project grew out of the investigator?s prior research finding that democracies were more likely than autocratic governments to eliminate the practice of torture only when there were no groups using violence to challenge the government. The study also found that institutional separation of powers made governments less likely to eliminate the practice of torture. Although this work identified important linkages between political institutions and the practice of torture, it was limited due to the crude data available about the extent to which governments fail to meet their obligation not to torture. In the investigator's prior NSF-funded work, more than 20 undergraduates and several graduate students read AI's publications for the years 1995-2005 and coded data on a wide variety of variables about the extent to which governments engaged in torture, investigated allegations of torture, and punished those found guilty of torturing prisoners. The result is a large database about the torture and ill-treatment practices of governments.This new project converts the raw data as collected into user-friendly data that can be accessed on the Internet. The raw data is being assembled into two formats, one of which is widely used throughout the scholarly literature on conflict, cooperation, and human rights, and the other of which is gaining increasing acceptance as a valuable alternative to the standard bearer. Undergraduate research assistants will be hired to perform the majority of these tasks. Florida State has an undergraduate research program that identifies, recruits, and trains students to participate in faculty research as preparation for pursuing honors theses and provides them with background to apply effectively to graduate programs or pursue other opportunities in which research plays a role. This project will thus contribute to the development of the nation's scientific infrastructure by providing the next generation of researchers with experience as undergraduates. The publicly available, user-friendly database will serve as a source of information for a variety of other analyses of interest to researchers and human rights advocates alike.